BAGHDAD — Insurgents struck at the heart of the Iraqi government on Wednesday in huge and coordinated bombings that exposed a new vulnerability after Americans ceded control for security here on June 30. Nearby American soldiers stood by helplessly — despite the needs of hundreds of wounded — waiting for a request for help from Iraqi officials that apparently never came.
A wave of bombings targeted symbols of government, the Foreign and Finance Ministries in central Baghdad, lending an air of siege to the capital. Dozens were killed and hundreds were wounded in the apparently coordinated attacks.
“As much as we want to come, we have to wait to be asked now,” said an American officer who arrived at one blast site almost three hours later and who spoke in return for anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters. At one blast site, American soldiers snapped pictures of the devastation before ducking out of the streets.
After weeks of escalating violence in Iraq, powerful truck bombs killed at least 95 people and wounded nearly 600 people at the Foreign and Finance Ministries in central Baghdad, assaults on symbols of government that lent an air of siege to the capital. The bombs crippled the downtown area, closed highways and two main bridges over the Tigris River and clogged hospitals with wounded.
The bombings, the worst since American forces handed over security responsibilities to Iraq at the end of June, shook the Iraqi government’s confidence that it was ready and able to secure the nation.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a reassessment of his security measures, calling the attacks “a vengeful response” to his recent, optimistic order to remove blast walls from the streets of Baghdad.
A Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, was quoted by Reuters as telling American and Iraqi military officers: “We must face the facts. We must admit our mistakes, just as we celebrate our victories.”
And Baghdad’s security spokesman, Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, told Iraqiya state television, according to Reuters, that attacks were “a security breach for which Iraqi forces must take most of the blame.”
The explosions, one close to the heavily fortified Green Zone and the other less than three miles away, sent plumes of smoke billowing over the capital, ripped a gaping hole in a compound wall and set cars ablaze, trapping drivers inside.
“The whole thing is just so disgusting,” the United States ambassador, Christopher R. Hill, said as he read reports from his staff about the extent of the damage while on an official visit to the northern city of Kirkuk. “They’re just psychopathic.”
Around 11 a.m., the two truck bombs struck the Foreign Ministry and the Finance Ministry within three minutes, officials said, sending white smoke into the sky. The second, more powerful blast was so intense that parts of a main highway near the Finance Ministry collapsed, the rubble littered with shrapnel and splotches of blood. It shattered windows inside the nearby Green Zone and shook houses in many parts of the city. At least 60 people were killed at the Foreign Ministry and at least 35 at the Finance Ministry.
At roughly the same time, attacks in other parts of the city, including three roadside bombs and some mortar and rocket fire, left 13 people wounded, Iraqi officials said.
Of course, the Liberal New York Times had to make sure that this quote was in there; Seeing they are the Anti-Military Paper that they are:
Though no one took credit for the attacks, Iraqis doled out blame both to their government, now fully responsible for security, and to the United States for coming to Iraq in the first place.
“This country is finished,” said one resident, Jamil Jaber, 45, whose five-room home behind the Foreign Ministry had been flattened, crushing a 4-month-old infant. “It’s just robbery and killing.” He cursed the United States and former President George W. Bush.
Oh, Of course, It is Bush’s fault because some idiot rag-head terrorist sets off a fucking bomb in the city of Baghdad. What a fucking ingrate! we should have just nuked that fucking Country into the damned stone age, instead of sending 4000+ of our troops into the Country to basically die; and for what? So some asshole Iraqi can blame us for their problems? What an asshole! That is if it is not a fake quote, which would not surprise me at all.
Here’s the deal folks; War is fucking hell, shit happens, people die. Get used to it! Saddam’s not in power anymore, and the people there are free. That idiot Iraqi sounds like most African-American Liberals; they want to blame someone else, namely White People, for their own damn problems. I suppose some Liberal might try and say that this is happening because we are in that Country in the first place. That is bullshit and most liberals know it.; We have all but left the damn country and the Iraqi Government is now running the show. Hence the Government taking forever to get on the scene.
One other thing I notice is, that most other Bloggers, Conservative and liberal are just not talking about this anymore. I think it is because of the healthcare debate; most people just are not thinking about Iraq. I am not one of these and I hope like hell, that President Obama does not pull us out, before the mission is over. We, as a Nation, cannot afford to make the mistake that we made in Vietnam. We made it before and had a black mark on us for years. We cannot do it again, it will be our shame, if we do.
Countdown to screechy liberals screaming at Obama for us to leave in 5…..4…..3….2…
California attorney Orly Taitz, who has filed a number of lawsuits demanding proof of Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, has released a copy of what purports to be a Kenyan certification of birth and has filed a new motion in U.S. District Court for its authentication.
The document lists Obama’s parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham, the birth date as Aug. 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth as Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.
No doctor is listed. But the alleged certificate bears the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Couya. It was allegedly issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964.
WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.
Last week, a counterfeit document purporting to be Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate made the rounds of the Internet, but was quickly determined to be fraudulent. The new document released by Taitz bears none of the obvious traits of a hoax.
Taitz told WND that the document came from an anonymous source who doesn’t want his name known because “he’s afraid for his life.”
Taitz’s motion, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, requests the purported evidence of Obama’s birth – both the alleged birth certificate and foreign records not yet obtained – be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya and seeks a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I filed the motion with the court asking for expedited discovery, which would allow me to start subpoenas and depositions even before Obama and the government responds,” Taitz told WND. “I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy and to require a deposition from Hillary Clinton so they will be forced to authenticate [the birth certificate].
“I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond,” she said.
“Before, they said, ‘You don’t have anything backing your claims,'” Taitz explained. “Now I have something. In fact, I have posted on the Internet more than Obama has. My birth certificate actually has signatures.”
Of course, already the terrorist supporters and Liberal traitors to America are already discounting this story. These are same ones who stabbed supporters of Israel in the back. So, this is not much of surprise.The funny thing is, these America and Israel hating, Terrorist loving bastards try to spin this into some sort of opposition to Nazi Fascism; when in reality they are the ones who are the Jew haters and Islamic terrorist sympathizers.Update: While I still have my issues with Charles Johnson, I publically retract this statement. I was had. Fuck Orally Tates the damn Zionist twit.
You see, liberals know how this man was elected. By Islamic and terrorist sympathizers abroad. It has been documented how there was no credit card verification system in place and one could add an address from anywhere and get away with it. In fact, the Federal Election Commission’s server is so slow, that it is impossible to go through the names of any of the candidates to check for fraud. Is this just consequential or is it by design? Those are the facts that I and many other America-loving patriots want to know.
Until we get these questions are answered. There will be no stop in the quest to find out the truth. Is President Barack Hussein Obama really a citizen of the Unite States of America? Until he releases the ORIGINAL, not a copy, but the ORIGINAL long form birth certificate. Real, clear thinking Americans, like me, will have assume that he is not.
– The design is identical, down to the seal at the top and the classifications (”Christian name,” etc) used for identifying the baby.
– The “registrar” on the Bomford document is G.F. Lavender. On the Taitz document, it’s E.F. Lavender.
– The “district registrar” on the Bomford document is J.H. Miller. On the Taitz document, it’s M.H. Miller.
– The number of the book is identical on both documents: Book 44B, Page 5733.
What’s more likely — that two Kenyan bureaucrats shared last names with two Australian bureaucrats, and that the numbers on both certificates were identical? Or that someone used this document, available online for anyone who wanted to look, to forge the Obama “certificate?”
Here’s the document:
As of right now, Orly Tate is discredited in my eyes. She ought to be stripped of her legal license for passing off phony documents as real ones. I will never ever make another posting about this subject again; unless I see some prove positive that Obama is not a United States Citizen. Shame on Joe Farah and his ilk for passing off stupid forgeries and Zionist propaganda as truth.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a global Sunni network with reported ties to confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al Qaeda in Iraq’s onetime leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It has operated discreetly in the U.S. for decades.
Now, it is coming out of the shadows and openly hosting a July 19 conference entitled, “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam,” at a posh Hilton hotel in a suburb of Chicago.
Hizb ut-Tahrir insists that it does not engage in terrorism, and it is not recognized by the State Department as a known terror group.
But some terrorism experts say it may be even more dangerous than many groups that are on the terror list.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir is one of the oldest, largest indoctrinating organizations for the ideology known as jihadism,” Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com.
Phares said that Hizb ut-Tahrir, rather than training members to carry out terrorist acts like Al Qaeda, focuses instead on indoctrinating youths between ages of 9 and 18 to absorb the ideology that calls for the formation of an empire — or “khilafah” — that will rule according to Islamic law and condones any means to achieve it, including militant jihad.
Liberals want us to believe that Muslims are our friends. Which is utter B.S.; Islam teaches their people to hate us Americans and our way of life. We as freedom loving Americans need to take a stand against this nonsense and expose it for what it truly is and that is a training ground for Terrorism.
This sounds just about right for that Administration:
“Extraordinary and inappropriate” secrecy about a warrantless eavesdropping program undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool, government watchdogs have concluded in the first examination of one of the most contentious episodes of the Bush administration.
A report by inspectors general from five intelligence agencies said the administration’s tight control over who learned of the program also contributed to flawed legal arguments that nearly prompted mass resignations in the Justice Department five years ago.
The program “may have” contributed to successful counterterrorism efforts, some intelligence officials told the investigators. But too few CIA personnel knew of the highly classified program to use it for intelligence work, the report stated, while at the FBI, the program “played a limited role,” with “most . . . leads . . . determined not to have any connection to terrorism.”
The surveillance program, which intercepted domestic communications linked to people with suspected ties to al-Qaeda, was one of the Bush administration’s most secretive and, eventually, controversial intelligence efforts. After the New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005, the program became a symbol of the administration’s expansive view of executive authority, especially regarding national security.
“The surveillance program was overly secret and its importance overblown,” concluded Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel of the privacy advocacy organization Center for Democracy and Technology, after reading the report.
The release yesterday of the inspectors general’s summary findings renewed questions about the effectiveness of congressional oversight of intelligence activities, after a week of back-and-forth between House members and the CIA over an unrelated classified program that has been squashed by the new administration. The IGs reported that lawmakers received 49 briefings on the surveillance program between October 2001 and January 2007.
Yeah, I know there is supposed to be some screwball liberal narrative here; somewhere anyhow. I think more than anything at all. This little story shows, if anything at all, the blatant incompetence, and the ineptitude of the previous administration. In layman’s terms; if anything, our previous President was an overzealous screwball. Granted, the program did work, but the insistence on keeping it so damn secret, caused it not to work; as it was supposed to.
This is a video of David Wood and Nabeel Qureshi asking questions at Arabfest, Dearborn. The date is June 21st, 2009. There was a booth at the festival which had a banner titled “Islam: Got Questions? Get Answers.” From their table, we picked up a pamphlet claiming that Islam promotes peace. We noticed that it was full of poor logic and errors, so we decided to make a video refuting it. We went to the booth that gave us the pamphlet to give them the opportunity to defend their claims. Security, however, stepped in and forced us to turn off our camera.
We left the booth, received advice from police, and found out that the actions of the security guards were illegal. We went back to the booth to record a potential answer again. Realizing that the Muslims present had no answer, we left.
When we came outside, we were asked some questions by two young men, who had been sent by security to entrap us. While we responded to them, festival security started assaulting us, as you will see in this video. The conclusion of this video is a mob of festival security attacking our cameras, pushing us back, kicking our legs, and lying to the police.
We ask you, is it a coincidence that the city with the highest percentage of Muslims in the United States is the city where Christianity is not allowed to be represented (let alone preached) on a public sidewalk? Is it coincidence that in this city, people will say “No way!” when we say “This is the United States of America”?
Is this what will happen when Islam takes over the United States?
You see Ladies and Gents, THIS is what celebrating diversity does to you. It gets you attacked by Islamic terrorist THUGS! Rick Warren and his purpose driven life, “Let’s love everyone and not judge”, kind of Christianity is just that; it celebrates diversity. Islam, a religion of peace….. What a lie! 😡 This is why, if I ever was going to film, I would go armed. Any security person who approached me and tried to hurt me, would be killed.
Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.
After months of internal debate over how to close the military facility in Cuba, White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the prison by the president’s January deadline.
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said that there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House is already trying to build support for an order.
“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should be prosecuted or released.
The Justice Department has declined to comment on the prospects for a long-term detention system while internal reviews of Guantanamo detainees’ cases are underway. One task force, which is assessing detainee policy, is expected to complete its work by July 21.
In a May speech, President Obama broached the need for a system of long-term detention and suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. “We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone,” he said.
Shall we start calling him President George W. Obama? It sure sounds like it. When the Conservatives AND Liberals are calling this plan a disaster; something is dreadfully wrong.
In the ongoing debate between President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney on torture, former CIA terrorism expert Michael Scheuer points out how both leaders’ refusal to address U.S. interventionism as the primary catalyst for terrorism makes us all “less safe.”
This news broke last night, but I was not in any mood to write about it.
Video Report, showing NY’s Mayor Bloomberg:
Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.
The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.
The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire Stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.
“This latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real and underscores why we must remain vigilant in our efforts to prevent terrorism,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a statement. The mayor was expected to appear at 6:45 a.m. Thursday at the Riverdale Jewish Center morning services, joined by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly.
The charges against the four men represent some of the most significant allegations of domestic terrorism in some time, and come months into a new presidential administration, as President Obama grapples with the question of how to handle detainees at the Guantánamo Bay camp in Cuba.
Rabbi Jonathan I. Rosenblatt, the senior rabbi at the Riverdale Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox congregation, said the police informed him on Wednesday evening that his synagogue was a target of the plot, as well as the Riverdale Temple, a Reform synagogue that is a short distance away, on Independence Avenue. The two buildings are about six blocks apart, each with a brick facade. Outside the synagogues on Wednesday night, the streets were eerily quiet.
Rabbi Rosenblatt said in a phone interview that he took the news with “shock, surprise — a sense of disbelief that something which is supposed to belong to the world of front pages and the evening news had invaded the quiet world of our synagogue.”
Of course, the Neo-Conservative Blogs are all over this one. A couple of things to point out:
There’s no proof at all, that these guys were connected to any sort of formal terrorist group
They never were able to obtain any sort of real weapons
So, what we have here is a group of wanna-be’s who got caught. This is what, the second time? The first was the much hyped Fort Dix plot; which turned out to be a great deal of nothing. I am sure that the Conservative media and blogs are going to hype this for all it is worth. The liberal-controlled media; hopefully, will take a more reasoned approach to the situation and report the facts, and shy away from the hype.
Do not misunderstand me here. I personally believe that the war on terrorism, as George W. Bush rightfully called it, is quite real. However, I have a hard time believing that this group of bumbling idiots were a part of it formally. If anything, these guys were a group of morons who could not even make a pipe bomb; much less a damn bomb capable of causing any sort of real damage.
As to why they did it. These guys were upset about our involvement in Afghanistan. We can expect to see this sort of a thing, as that War progresses. Now the idiots on the far liberal left will try and say that this is why we should leave Afghanistan. Which any sane, rational person knows is foolish. We should not leave until Osama and his henchmen are dead and Al-Qaeda is formally defeated. Some say this is impossible. I believe nothing is impossible, if it is done correctly. The far left likes to bring up that Russia tried to fight a war in this region and ended up pulling out. I say; apples and oranges. Different kind of a war, and the Russians did not have nearly the Military that we have and the technology that we have today.
The good thing about all this is, that this terrorist cell was broken up and these idiots are going to jail. Thanks to the fine work of our men at the F.B.I. Good show guys, keep up the good work.
Update: …and then there’s the Libertarian conspiracy theorist angle. No wonder the Republicans think that most libertarians are kooks.
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